Heritage and territory: the «Massae» in the rural areas of Southern Italy

The masserias (buildings farms) identify those residential-productive-rural constructions typical of Southern Italy, having the characteristics that the Latin etymology of the term contains: “massae”, i.e. block, a set of rural buildings, usually surrounding courtyards or less extensive, each with different intended uses, but constituting a single corporate or legal reality [1]. The term masseria, therefore, reveals a precise meaning, better determined over time, as a logistic center of the productive activities of the rural economy, as an autonomous company with a large estate orientation, linked to the cultivation of the field sand/or to the breeding of animals; it will be precisely the prominence of one of the two main activities, the alternation between these two orientations, that will define, in its general lines, the typological structure of the farms and their formal image. Of course, it takes different forms and types also depending on the geographic allocation, morphological, environmental and cultu